I
am not sure how you come to an appreciation of dialect
poetry in a foreign language. Even dialects of your
own language are hard enough. If you are from
Paris, you are not necessarily familiar with
Provençal, the language of southern France, the
brilliant language of the troubadours in the Middle
Ages. Or in English, unless you are actually from
Scotland or have a particular interest in Scots
English, you probably know less than you should about
Robert Burns.

I
am using the term "dialect" in its precise linguistic
sense: a variety of language, in no sense inferior or
less than the standard language, simply the non-standard
variety of an official language, one spoken by a
relatively small group of people in a limited area; thus,
Provençal in France, Scots in Britain, and, the case
in point, Neapolitan in Italy. [For another item on
the Neapolitan dialect, click
here.]

That
positive definition of "dialect" is not necessarily
appreciated even by the people who speak one. There is
throughout the world a feeling among many speakers of
such dialects that there is something uneducated about
the way they speak, something wrong with not
conforming to a national standard. It is, however, a
matter of fact that many dialects have long histories
of song, poetry and theater and have simply lost the
social, political (and, in some cases, military)
struggle over who comes out on top in the "official
language" contest. (There is, very recently, a
backlash against standard, homogenized culture;
witness the worldwide attention now being paid to the
plight of so-called "endangered languages".)

In
the case of Italian, if you have studied it formally,
you have learned the national language of Italy, the
recognized standard based on the medieval Tuscan
vernacular Latin of Dante, the language of The
Divine Comedy, the progenitor of modern Italian
literature. You can travel the length of Italy—and
you can even live in the country successfully—and communicate
quite well with most people, but you are still at
a disadvantage when it comes to appreciating local
varieties of language, the dialects that some 60%
of Italians still speak at home. And, of course,
you will not be able to enjoy the considerable
body of dialect literature, theater and song.

The
dialect of Naples has a long written history.
It was the written court language of the Aragonese
dynasty in Naples in the 1400s. From that period,
Neapolitan gave us the works of Jacopo Sannazaro,
whose verses in vernacular were influential in
providing models for the formation of modern
Italian, itself. Neapolitan was the language of The Tale of Tales (Lo
Cunto de li Cunti) from the early 1600s, the
oldest and most celebrated collection of folk tales,
including Zezolla, the original tale of Cinderella.
In the 18th-century, Neapolitan was the language of
the Comic Opera, a
forerunner of modern musical comedy. And, of course,
the entire world knows the
Neapolitan Song, though perhaps misidentifies
it as "Italian" music. In the 20th-century, the
great Neapolitan playwright, Eduardo
de Filippo, is perhaps the Neapolitan best
known abroad for his work. Again, the plays of
Eduardo are usually "Italianized" when they are
produced in other parts of Italy, simply so an
audience in, say, Milan can understand them.
"Italianized," here, means keeping the general
Neapolitan accent, cadences, some vocabulary, but
changing the died-in-the-wool Neapolitan vocabulary
to a more widely understood standard. Neapolitan has
one advantage that other Italian dialects do not:
Eduardo is so well known, the Neapolitan Song is so
well known, Neapolitan comics such as Totò and, more recently, Massimo Troisi, are so well
known, that all Italians will tell you that they
understand at least some Neapolitan.

Salvatore Di
Giacomo is best known among Neapolitans as the
lyricist for a number of Neapolitan songs, most
popular of which is Marechiaro. Among poetry
lovers, however, and literary critics, he is one of
those responsible for renewing Neapolitan dialect
poetry at the turn of the 19th/20th century in the
face of the onslaught of standardized Italian, the
language of newly united Italy. Again, dialect is
not to be seen necessarily as the language of rough
realism, the language of the lower classes and the
uneducated. (It may be that, too; in English, for
example, that angle is caricatured in such works as
Shaw's Pygmalion, where the whole play is
given over to remaking Liza Doolittle by remaking
the way she speaks.) The language of Salvatore Di
Giacomo is not the everyday language of his
contemporaries. It is not the language of, say, the
Neapolitan working class of the late 1800s. His
Neapolitan has a distinct 18th-century flavor to it,
archaisms that recall the golden age of Neapolitan
culture, the period between 1750-1800, when
Neapolitan was the language of the best-loved form
of musical entertainment in Italy, the Neapolitan
Comic Opera, and was even the language of the
Bourbon court of Naples, itself. His language has,
thus, somewhat the feeling of nostalgia to it. Turns
of centuries seem to bring that out in poets.

Di Giacomo was
born in Naples in 1860. His father was a doctor and
his mother a musician. He studied medicine briefly,
largely to satisfy his father's wishes, but then
gave it up for the life of a poet. He founded a
literary journal, Il Fantasio, in 1880, and,
like many young writers, had a varied
apprenticeship: he worked in a print shop for a
while; he was a journalist, publishing some of his
early verse in the Neapolitan daily, il Mattino;
he showed up at poetry readings and song festivals
to read his material. He even wrote a series of
youthful stories à la Hoffman and Poe set in
an imaginary German town inhabited by sinister
students and mad doctors. Not unsurprisingly, he had
a lifelong love of libraries as well as literary and
historical research, founding, in the course of his
career, the Lucchese section of the National library
in Naples and holding the position of assistant
librarian at the library of the Naples Music Conservatory.
He was, with Benedetto Croce,
one of the founders of the literary journal, Napoli
Nobilissima. He received a critical boost in
1903 when Croce published a defense of dialect
poetry. Di Giacomo published no anthology of his
collected poems until 1907 when he was 47 years old.
He died in 1934.

His plays, such
as A San Francesco and Assunta Spina,
are bitter stories about turn-of-the-century life in
the Naples of the Risanamento (the massive
and decades-long urban renewal
of the city that displaced tens of thousands of
persons), workers whose health is ruined by their
labors, prostitution, betrayal, prison, crime,
etc.—all this, perhaps, to show that he wasn't just
a songwriter. He did write, as noted above, easily
and abundantly for the famous Neapolitan song
festival of Piedigrotta,
a fact that still leads some critics to dismiss him
as a lightweight. Financially, he did all right from
the song-writing business, at least for a while.
Before WWI, a major German piano manufacturer, Polyphon
Musikwerke, opened and sponsored a record shop
in Naples, providing Di Giacomo with an outlet for
his work. The outbreak of the war, however, and
subsequent anti-German sentiment caused the shop to
close.

Di Giacomo was a
passionate reader and reporter of history, though
again, in the eyes of critics, not a "real" historian.
He had the delightful journalistic flair for padding
the word count. Thus, a very informative history of
Neapolitan theaters, including, of course, San Carlo, starts with a
2,000-word letter written by a bored opera-goer, a
woman present in 1737 at opening night of the
first-ever opera put on in the new theater. She wrote
the letter in the course of the performance! Di
Giacomo delighted in pointing things out that not
everyone knew about very familiar places in Naples:
that little church, Santa Maria
della Graziella, down there on the side street
that you pass every day, was the site of the original
opera house in Naples; or the
famous grotto behind the church of Piedigrotta —was that
really the site of the goings-on recounted in the most
infamous piece of pornography in Latin literature,
Petronius' Satyricon?

One gets the
feeling that Di Giacomo viewed standard language as
a necessary evil —good, even necessary, for modern
commerce and politics, but almost by definition
devoid of the life that people bring to the language
they speak, the joy, sadness, lust, music, the
vernacular turn of phrase that exists only at a
particular place in a particular time for a
particular people. He closed his own essay on
Neapolitan dialect poetry, written in 1900, with
this passionate quote from the great
vernacularizer, Dante: "With the gifts God gives
us from Heaven, we shall try to renew the language
of the common people."